by Karen and Erica

Over the years that we worked, many of us were targets of bad behavior, like leering remarks or looks, or the assumption that typing skills were all that we had to offer. (We are not talking here about behavior, like rape and sexual assault, or threats of either, crimes then as now and intolerable ever.) For the most part, we just kept moving forward. We weren’t comfortable with that treatment, and we weren’t oblivious, but we needed our jobs and we wanted to succeed.

Women our age are finally getting angry at the things that happened to us over the years, reports a recent New York Times article. The piece came out just as we commenced recording podcasts with fabulous women who made their way to the top of their careers by navigating exactly the same sort of roadblocks. Some of them remembered being given advice that they appreciated at the time—that they were too aggressive, that the men thought they were bitchy, and that if they wanted to succeed they had to tone it down and take a back seat. We did want to succeed, and we did need to know what we had to do to succeed, so we listened. And sometimes we passed the advice along to other women. But now we wonder. What were we thinking?

Of course we know what we were thinking. We were new players in a male-dominated world, and we would not have succeeded if we had been seen as bitchy. (Of course, you couldn’t be a wimp, either. The bitch/wimp paradigm allowed only a very narrow path for success.) So yes, we needed to be told what worked. We needed the information our mentors provided.

If we received the same advice today we would have an entirely different response. We would retort, as one of our friends put it: stop trying to fix the women. And if our daughters were told not to be forceful because they might be perceived as bitchy, the consequences for the messenger would be forceful indeed. Along the lines of this.

But are we mad as hell? Some of what happened to us does make us mad, in retrospect, though we seldom dwell on the past. To the extent we lost opportunities because we did not subscribe to stereotypes, or because those in charge did not think a woman could do the job, of course it makes us mad when we think about it. But we don’t think about it much, and when we do we realize that some of it was just neanderthal behavior. We hope it is fading away—though maybe not.

And we know that sometimes life takes funny turns. As RBG observed, if she and Sandra Day O’Connor had not been blocked from law firm jobs, they would have been retired law partners, instead of Supreme Court justices. That’s no excuse for sexism, but it does show that the arc of history is unpredictable.

Recent events and disclosures have caused many of us to recall things that we put away in the dark recesses of our minds. We can’t forgive some of it, and we are glad our perspective—and the workplace—are different today. Our advice to those now on their way up will be different than our past advice might have been. But what we’re mad as hell about now is what happens now—like when we hear about workplace situations that seem un-evolved, or when people act as if act a woman over 65 has no place in that workplace. That’s what matters today.

Are you mad as hell? Or not? We would love to hear your story.